the book by Piero Golia

I fell for it. Halfway through The Book By Piero Golia, I felt like a fool.
Dressed in the ever-non-essential clothes of the reader of art, I was patrolling around the self-irony of Piero’s art, retracing the accounts of works, installations, performances - it’s hard to define his work, “situations” might perhaps be a good term, for someone who has made escaping military service a work of art - until there, exactly midway through the book, I caressed them. The golden pages. There are eight, irresistible, spellbinding, golden pages. And I no longer thought about anything else. Concepts, analogies, epiphanies: tabula rasa. They are so smooth, and bright. Obviously, I realised what had happened, once I’d gone back the critical distance. The instant later. The instant of the fool. He must have felt the same way, for the same infinitesimal instant, that collector who in Turin bought one of his works to make him come down from the palm tree where he was perched. Just for an instant, right before happily realising that he was part of an art “situation”. Self-irony goes hand-in-hand with contagion, inevitable, unstoppable: the goat e-scapes this time, and giggles. I fell for it, in his book. Exorbitant book, of proteiform pages and paper, of uncataloguable words, halfway between the commitment to explain and the impulse to tell, to wander. Book-theatre, at the limit, on the edge, in excess: stage of the limit. And Piero continually returns there, onto that stage, he is always on both sides of a prank, the cheerful engineer, melancholy iconoclast, glittering-anarchist, humble-primadonna: “I’m serious!”, he proclaims. The liar, the one of the paradox, finally has a face. Or does he?
Yet maybe I haven’t understood a thing. It’s not serious. I’m just sorry I ruined a surprise…